Cool Hand Luke the Film

Cool Hand Luke the Film Cool Hand Luke" is both a movie about resistance against authority and disobedience, as well as a movie about leadership. However, all these particular segments can be expanded to include other secondary themes, such as humanity in general and the relationships that develop between human beings, depending on what level of authority they find themselves on, and the human individuality itself, with Luke Jackson (and some of the other prisoners as well) attempting to discover his own personality, beyond his own behaviors.

Each of these themes is tied with each other: the disobedience theme is closely related to the development of the individual in his relationship with authority, but also with the other characters in the movie. The whole movie revolves around the personality of Luke Jackson, interpreted by Paul Newman, and his inability to both fit in socially and to adapt to the rules that society imposes. This is what gets him into prison from the very beginning: while drunk, he destroys parking meters during the night.

While the offence is apparently mild, the different actions that the character enterprises during the movie, his incapacity to adapt to the situation he is in and his revolted character make him a victim throughout and eventually bring his final downfall. The idea of leadership that has been introduced in the thesis of this paper also comes from his disobedience and resistance to the authority of the prison.

This is something tempting for his fellow prisoners who see in this an extraordinary capacity of maintaining one's spirit and ideals and remaining upright despite the prison's challenges and numerous provocations, without any compromises. With this in mind, they easily turn Luke's revolt into something they would themselves embrace, if only they had some of Luke's qualities. This, in turn, easily transforms Luke into a leader among his group, because the distance from idolatry to leadership is not very big.

However, it is also from this disobedience that Luke's humanity transposes throughout the film. One of the most important scenes is the one where he has to dig a whole in the camp yard, only to fill it up after that and start all over again. This the clear Sisyphus Myth, slightly changed in the movie (in the myth, Sisyphus has to push a rock up a mountain, only for the rock to fall again to the bottom of the mountain once the top is reached).

The act itself is obviously useless, but has a tremendous impact on Luke's spirit and evolution. It is at the same time the appropriation of the idea that everything is in vain and useful. However, again connecting this with disobedience and disrespect for authority, the message goes even beyond the simple physical effort to incorporate passing on the message that all his escapes are in fact in vain as well, as is his continuous revolt against the system and against authority.

It is true, however, that Luke does have another tentative escape, however, by this time, the idolized respect of his prisoners is partially gone. The obvious reason for this is that, following his partial submission, Luke is more and more like the other prisoners, with their spirits already broken. With him having become, to a certain degree, one of them, there is no particular additional necessity for them to look up to Luke anymore either. How should one interpret the final escape attempt? There are definitely more sides to it.

First of all, Luke is trying to escape his prison condition and, in conformity with everything that has been shown so far, battle authority and manifest his disobedience against rules and order. However, it is also an attempt to escape his own human condition, also a similar type of prison to the one he is experimenting in his real existence.

Caught between a set of societal rules that need to be respected in order to be able to survive in society and his own fight against authority, corroborated with his desire to lead an existence without such boundaries, Luke attempts escapes from his own human condition, which is probably what increases the drama and tragedy of the movie, because we all know that is not possible except through death. This also anticipates the end of the movie and the final scene. Luke is also isolated from the other human beings.

His final phrase is very significant in this sense: "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." There are so many things incorporated in this phrase. First of all, it is a personal statement. Luke has not succeeded throughout the movie to communicate with the authorities and with the decision makers and they are not able to communicate with him either (the phrase had been mentioned before in the movie by the captain).

Second, it is also a statement that has reference to the entire society and is somewhat not specifically temporal as well: the humans have failures to communicate with one another, which makes it all the harder for them to get along and to create the appropriate relationships between each other. The drama of the movie goes beyond the individual drama of the main character to be extended to a more collective drama of the entire society.

With that in mind, Luke's death does not really solve that problem and, in fact, shows.